LibreOffice 26.8 became the app’s most popular update, with over 1 million downloads, after the foundation behind it declared that LibreOffice doesn’t come with generative AI features due to the…
For a few years I had a subscription to Office. I thought I was more productive.
But I… probably wasn’t?
It’s hard to qualify. LibreOffice always felt like an office suite. “You can do things here.” Boom. I did it.
Office was like “But wait! There’s a zillion more things you can do! Until your subscription expires at least.”
But then I got curious. How exactly do I do these zillion new things in LibreOffice??? They claim to be mostly document compatible, so how do I do the same stuff?
Aha. I can actually do this shit. Turns out most of this stuff was very minor spreadsheet thingamaijggery. Want to lock rows or columns? It’s slightly different. Want to do weird icons for values? It’s slightly different. Etc.
It took me forever to learn that Calc refers to cells in other sheets like SheetName.CellNumber while Excel and Google Sheets use SheetName!CellNumber and I just thought either LibreOffice was broken or I was always doing something else wrong.
For a few years I had a subscription to Office. I thought I was more productive.
But I… probably wasn’t?
It’s hard to qualify. LibreOffice always felt like an office suite. “You can do things here.” Boom. I did it.
Office was like “But wait! There’s a zillion more things you can do! Until your subscription expires at least.”
But then I got curious. How exactly do I do these zillion new things in LibreOffice??? They claim to be mostly document compatible, so how do I do the same stuff?
Aha. I can actually do this shit. Turns out most of this stuff was very minor spreadsheet thingamaijggery. Want to lock rows or columns? It’s slightly different. Want to do weird icons for values? It’s slightly different. Etc.
Very important learning experience!
It took me forever to learn that Calc refers to cells in other sheets like SheetName.CellNumber while Excel and Google Sheets use SheetName!CellNumber and I just thought either LibreOffice was broken or I was always doing something else wrong.